Looking for advice on how to tweak the Draft Dominator auction baselines - the default ones still stick Rodgers at like $58 in a 6pt passing league (with yardage bonuses) but I don't know that I'd ever approach that plateau. Need advice on how to tweak it from someone with successful experience navigating DD for an auction draft. Thanks,
Not counting scoring system and the actual projections, there are three major things in DD that drive the auction prices.
1) The baseline that you set will change the VBD value for each player. That VBD value is eventually multiplied by the Discretionary Money in the league, and divided by the total VBD points available, to reach a value. So changing VBD value changes cost. Some baselines, like Joe's baseline, have built in weighting applied to the baselines. Other choices may not, or you may build in your own weighting such as using by positional rank.
2) In the Setup screen, bottom left, is Calc Starts Top and Calc Starts Base. This is a calculation based on MT's auction method. Essentially what it says is, the amount you pay should be influenced by the number of fantasy games he's likely to actually start for you. And QB1 tends to start a lot more fantasy games than does QB10. So MT is saying there should be some extra weighting involved. I believe the first value is how many starts you think the top player gets, and the bottom is how many the baseline player gets, and then it interpolates between them for everyone else. MT did a study of some leagues to see what real values were for that, and he fit an equation to the data so you can calculate the number for any player. In DD, click on Help -> Auction Pricing to be taken to his article that has the formulas.
3) In the install directory there is an auction.csv file which applies a multiplier somewhere in the calculations based on position rank. I believe it multiplies their VBD value used in calculations, though the displayed one doesn't change. The multiplier for QB1 is 1.4, for QB2 it is 1.35 and gradually descends, while the first 13 RBs get 1.5 as a multiplier. You can edit this file to your liking, including adding additional rows. I recommend saving a copy of the original. I believe this was put in because values didn't tend to match what they saw in real auctions (though I could be wrong on that).
Ok, so those are the ways you can change the auction prices. So which do you change? That's a really tough question. You can really influence them wildly depending on what you do, and what you want them to show.
I have my own preferences which are largely driven by my playing in non-standard leagues, where the weightings are different. So I'm not sure how much I'd advise you to go with my settings. I sometimes make every player in auction.csv a value of 1 to remove it from the equation. Or other times I've gotten real data on number of fantasy starts from my league history, and I set Calc Starts and ENd to the same number so it effectively removes it from the calculation, and then I built my own auction.csv with multipliers based on expected number of starts.
For a standard league though, I'm not sure if you want to go that route. I do feel leery of using the default auction.csv with Joe's baseline because I do think it double dips. I think people generally overpay for the top players and too much was done to try to make the results look more like real leagues, rather than leave them showing the top players are overpaid. I think if you include MT's starts stuff, that picks up most of what needs to do be done in that regard.
So, that's probably what I'd do in a standard league. I'd probably make auction.csv all be 1's and set my own VBD baselines, but I'd stick with MT's Calc stuff, and make sure the numbers were appropriate for my league. (MFL has a report on how many times players started that is great).